Should India launch a Sovereign Wealth Fund? India has foreign currency reserves topping $254 billion. Most of it is invested in “safe and liquid” US Treasury Bills. The returns on these investments are very small because the risks are low. All other BRIC countries are experimenting with different investment strategies. Many have set up…
My Blogs
Aaj Janey ki zid na karo
(This Ghazal has a strong link with Calcutta in a strange way. The poet Fayyaz Hashmi was born in Calcutta in 1920. He lived in Hayat Khan Lane until the tumultous days of partition in 1947 when the family left for Lahore in Pakistan. The ghazal was immortalized by the Queen of Ghazals Farida…
5 Best Eating Places in Kolkata (Published in the Economic Times)
My five favourite eating places are Pan Asian at the ITC Sonar , Kewpie’s Kitchen, Peter Cat, Mainland China and ,last but not the least, the Dining Room at the Bengal Club. Pan Asian is an excellent restaurant that offers a wide variety of cuisines:Japanese, Chinese, Thai, Mongolian and one or two Korean dishes.They have…
A Ray of Hope
A Moveable Feast: Ray of hope PwC’s skunkworks project Ray’s World is a tribute to thinking out of the box Every global consulting company today has digital studios swarming with creative people in outlandish dresses, strange hairstyles and non-conformist thinking. In 2015, I visited the studio of Übermind, which was acquired by Deloitte Consulting and…
Digital Bharat
The making of a digital Bharat Exactly 20 years ago, Nicholas Negroponte of MIT Media Labs wrote a book called Being Digital. In that book, he distinguished between ‘atoms’ and ‘bits’. Atoms make up physical, tangible objects such as CDs, books and letters. Digital information, on the other hand, is made up of bits, the…
Are we ready for the new technology wave?
Is India ready for an IT revolution? Bloomberg ATTACHED ALGORITHM: As connected devices proliferate and networks penetrate into remote regions, the potential for IoT solutions and growth in the IoT ecosystem has increased One of my British mentors told me that technology waves are similar to a London red bus. You do not know…
Corruption and Growth with Equity
AAP WINDS OF CHANGE: Arvind Kejriwal meets citizens after he was sworn in as Delhi’s chief minister, on December 29, 2013. The electoral success of AAP based on the promise of eradication of corruption has changed the mainstream discourse Developing countries have been suffering from corruption and draining of financial resources for a very long…
Changing Times
Adapting to the changing times Bloomberg TOP NOTCH: Craig Federighi, vice president of software engineering at Apple, speaks during the keynote of the World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC) in San Francisco, California, US, on June 10 “As the present now, Will later be past The order is rapidly fadin’ And the first one now Will…
Bottom of the pyramid innovations
There is no doubt that innovation is the mantra for survival in a constantly changing and uncertain world. And, yet, the best brains innovate and research for causes that do not change the world for those who are economically disadvantaged. When Bill Gates came back to Harvard Business School (HBS) to pick up his degree,…
Changing the pyramid’s shape
In the 1960s the American meteorologist Edward Lorenz, a pioneer of the chaos theory, discovered, more or less by chance, that the mathematical models for the weather system were extremely sensitive to initial conditions. His discovery came to be known as the “butterfly effect”. A popular version of the theory: a butterfly flapping its wings…